Unveiled (Turner, #1)

“I don’t ever want you to think otherwise. Not for an instant.”


There was a fierce note in her voice as she spoke. So it hadn’t been the premonition of mere lust he’d sensed, that day he’d first seen her. It had been a tiny taste of this—this intimacy that went so far beyond mere desire. It had wound itself between them, interlacing his own emotions. He could untangle their intertwined fingers, but he couldn’t unravel this.

He inhaled her breath, and he believed. He leaned down and tasted her lips. There was no prelude to the kiss—no light tentative touches, to be sure of his reception. It was a full, hot-blooded exchange the instant their mouths touched, carnal and wanting. Desperate. His body reacted to the feel of her in his arms—her soft roundedness, the slim curve of her waist. But it wasn’t just lust that made him pull her close.

He kissed her because she made him feel strong where he’d felt vulnerable and weak. Because she saw him—all of him—and didn’t wince and glance away. Because she knew what he was like when he was stripped of defenses, and she reached for him anyway.

This was what he wanted—her. Margaret. No. Them.

When he lifted his head to draw breath, she looked at him.

“Remember,” she said softly. “When—when you know everything. Remember. You are important. And…and I mean that.”

And then, before he could ask her what she meant, she pulled away from him and left.



MARGARET HAD SEEN Ash cheerfully powerful, as talkative as a jaybird. She’d seen him silently powerful while he was listening to those around her. She didn’t like seeing him vulnerable. It made her feel odd inside—hotly angry on his behalf, and enraged that someone had made him feel that way.

Rather hypocritical; in a short space of time, when the truth came out, she would be the one to introduce doubt into his life.

She shook her head and walked down the gallery towards her father’s room. The duke’s chambers lay past the end of the wide hall, down another long hallway. For months, the length of that hall had been enshrouded in silence as she traversed it. The servants tasked with airing the rooms that abutted his sickroom had walked on tiptoe, for fear the slightest noise would bring on the duke’s ire.

But as she walked down the hall today, she heard the deep rumble of masculine laughter. A door was ajar; as she passed by, a thin slit of daylight made a jaunty angle across the dark carpet.

Mrs. Benedict must have put Ash’s brothers in the upper parlor. Margaret stopped, and another ring of laughter traveled out to greet her. Mark’s chuckle she already knew. His brother, the middle Mr. Turner with the dreadful name—he must have been the one with the baritone.

Margaret set her hand against the door and pushed it open another few inches.

The brothers stood on the far side of the room, leaning towards one another as if in each other’s confidences. They had thrown a window open, and they were looking out, the curtains fluttering about them. They did not see her enter, as they were both engaged in gazing into the distance, their shoulders forming one uniform wall. She would have guessed they were brothers from that unity. If that hadn’t betrayed their relationship she could see some similarity in their figures. They were both lean without being skinny, tall without towering over her.

Her mother had used this parlor as a dry, stuffy place to take tea; it had the most formal arrangement of all the rooms in Parford Manor. Margaret could not recall a time when the gilded walls had ever felt a breeze. For as long as she remembered, the curtains had been tightly drawn to protect the lush carpet underfoot from the sun.

But daylight played across the window sash now, spilling carelessly from there onto the priceless carpet.

It wasn’t the sunlight Margaret minded. It wasn’t the laughter that set her stomach to a slow boil. It was the way these two men stood in such close friendship, never caring that not so far from this room their eldest brother was feeling vulnerable. Alone.

The taller gentleman—Mr. Smite Turner—appeared to be in the midst of telling his brother a story. He had shed his coat and had draped it over one arm—a trick that reminded her of Ash. He gesticulated with the other hand. His face was turned in profile. His visage was a quiet echo of Ash’s. But where Ash had dark, curling hair, this man’s was cropped close to his skull, and it was almost ebony. Where Ash’s skin was tinged in color from the sun, this man was pale.